09 September, 2016

Stein: Wall Street should pay sales tax

Το
the stereotypical question "where will you get the money?" that especially and usually the establishment pundits of the corporate media like to ask all the time, Jill Stein
gives again the right answer.

In a recent
interview at The Young Turks, Green Party's nominee for President of
the United States in the 2016 election, had the chance to give the full and right answers, without being deliberately interrupted, or, censored.

As Stein said, the real issue is actually who, is leading the US
government. Is the US a real democracy for the people, or a false
democracy for the fossil-fuel giants and the war profiteers? Once the
American people decide clearly which way they will go, the money can
be found, and actually, work for the benefit of the majority and the
environment.

A few
key points:

We need an
organizer in chief in the White House, so that we actually have the
bully pulpit that's being used to inform and empower the American
people who should be the driver of our democracy. We know that there
is public support for a jobs program. We know that majorities
actually support the right to a job and for a government job for that
matter, if the jobs are not forthcoming from the private sector. The
costs of this are actually small compared to the cost of the climate
crisis if it's allowed to continue and the cost of ongoing health
care crisis.

We know that
by moving to clean energy, we actually save 200,000 lives per year,
and that's just the tip of the iceberg of all the diseases related to
fossil fuels. So, it turns out this pays for itself, just in terms of
the health benefits alone are enough to pay the cost of the
transition. So, it's simply a matter of providing the money up front
that will be repaid in our health savings, not to mention our climate
savings and the savings in our war budget, which is devouring half of
our discretionary budget.

We could
also tax Wall Street. Why should the most profitable sector of the
economy, not be paying sales tax? Every day, Americans are paying
sales tax on just about everything. All sectors of the economy are
paying it. Wall Street needs to pay it. That can provide us the
hundreds of billions of dollars. It's not a question of how, it's a
question of public will and it's a question of who is leading our
government.

What lifts
up Donald Trump is this economic misery, this desperation in which
demagogues thrive. Where did that come from? These were the policies
of Bill Clinton supported by Hillary that created the Wall Street
deregulation that led to the meltdown and the disappearance of nine
million jobs with the theft of five million homes. It was the
Clintons that brought us the crime bill that opened the floodgates to
mass incarceration. It was the Clintons who promoted and Bill who
signed NAFTA, that sent our jobs overseas.

We're being
kool-aid boarded here by this toxic propaganda that's trying to
brainwash us into a sense of powerlessness. Alice Walker said, the
biggest way people give up power, is by not knowing we have it to
start with.

There are 43
million young people who are locked into predatory student loan debt.
The Democrats do not offer a way out any more than the Republicans.
In fact, the Democrats have been as much a part of the
financialization of student debt. We can bring out enough people to
actually take over this election, to end student debt by bailing out
the students. We bailed out Wall Street, it's about time to bail out
their victims, making public higher education free.

We can
create an emergency jobs program that also fixes the climate crisis,
a welcoming path to citizenship, end the police violence, and a
foreign policy based on international law and human rights.

We have the
power when we stand up. We have not only the solutions we need, we
have the numbers that it takes to actually win the day. Reject the
lesser evil, fight for the greater good like our lives depend on it
because in fact they do.

We are
coming up in the polls without having any visibility in big media and
remember, the polls are largely expected voters, but what we are
doing, is bringing out unexpected voters. We are empowering
disempowered voters like Millennials who've been sitting it out
recently, like the labor movement, which has also found it very hard
to vote on behalf of midterm Democrats. We are giving people a reason
to come out and vote.